358:327 Restoration and Eighteenth Century Women Writers

Prior to the end of the seventeenth century, only a handful of nuns and aristocratic women had the time and community of support that allowed them to overcome a strong prejudice against their putting pen to paper for public consumption. We will examine the emergence of women writers as a group and the factors that made this possible, concentrating mainly on their contribution to the rise of the novel, since, in the period that we will be studying, "the novel alone," as Virginia Woolf has remarked, "was young enough to be soft in [their] hands."